Tell Governor Haslam: Free Cyntoia Brown Now!

Cyntoia Brown was just 16 when she was sex-trafficked by a pimp called “Kut-throat.” Just days after being repeatedly drugged and raped by different men, a 43-year-old man purchased her for sex and took her to his home. When she feared for her life, she acted in self-defense and killed him.

Cyntoia survived violence and found the courage to save her own life, but the state of Tennessee put her under trial as an adult for first degree murder. This week, the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that Cyntoia will have to serve 51 years before she is eligible for release. We can’t let this injustice stand!

Tell Governor Haslam to #FreeCyntoiaBrown and grant her clemency today!

As of right now, Cyntoia has already served 14 years in prison. Cyntoia is living proof of the harm our “justice” system does to girls and women of color. While so many white men are given a slap on the wrist for violence against women, Cyntoia was incarcerated and given another staggeringly harsh sentence.

Governor Haslam has a chance to end this outrage and grant Cyntoia clemency. But, he has just six weeks left to do the right thing and he needs to hear from you today!

We can’t erase the trauma that Cyntoia endured or give her back the fourteen years she’s been imprisoned, but we can fight to set her free.

“CIA Extraordinary Rendition and Detention Program — countries involved in the Program,” according to the Open Society Foundation. Originally posted here, reproduced by terms of license, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported

A major aspect of the CIA’s detention and interrogation operations has been purposefully hidden from view, primarily due to secrecy guidelines that make it illegal for anyone “read into” the program to reveal even its very existence.

Recent declassified documents make clear that there was not one, but two CIA torture programs. These programs used different interrogation techniques, responded to different bureaucracies within the CIA, and had very different levels of oversight.

This article reveals for the first time a crucial untold aspect of the story behind the construction and development of the CIA’s torture programs, such as we can understand them today (December 2018).

I will try to retell the history of the CIA’s interrogation and detention programs with this new understanding of how they originated, were constructed, and how they operated. This revisionist history is open source document-based, and it’s worth noting that there is much disinformation and obscure history to clarify.

At the close of this article, we will look at some possible reasons for the separation of the two programs, and the meaning of all this for current investigators and concerned citizens.

It’s been sixteen years since Gul Rahman died of hypothermia, beaten and left half-naked and short shackled to a bare prison floor at the CIA-run Salt Pit “black site” prison in Afghanistan. It is not known what the CIA did to his corpse. His body was never turned over to his family.

From the title page of the SSCI’s Executive Summary on CIA’s detention and torture program

According to a report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, conditions at the Salt Pit were incredibly awful: “One senior interrogator, told the CIA OIG that ‘literally, a detainee could go for days or weeks without anyone looking at him,’ and that his team found one detainee who, ‘as far as we could determine,’ had been chained to the wall in a standing position for 17 days.”

Yet in other documents, we are told that CIA detainees were under constant surveillance. When Abu Zubaydah was locked inside a confinement box by CIA torturers, there were cameras transmitting “grainy video” of him inside the box at all times. The amount of time spent in extended sleep deprivation was meticulously monitored for some detainees, but not others.

How could there be such wide divergence in CIA torture operations? What was going on?

A Secret Program on “Enhanced Interrogation”

Twelve years ago, in September 2006, the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” and detention program essentially ended, when the remaining detainees held at CIA black sites around the world were sent to Guantanamo’s Camp 7. Its final demise can be traced to President Obama’s January 2009 withdrawal of the Bush-era Department of Justice memos which justified the use of waterboarding, extended sleep deprivation and other brutal interrogation techniques.

In order to renew the DNI, passport and registration, the complete vaccination card must be presented.

The Senate approved on Wednesday a law that establishes the obligatory nature and free of vaccination against preventable diseases for all the inhabitants of the country, and stipulates that the complete vaccination card will be required at the time of processing the DNI, passport and driving record , among others.

The project was promoted by the Tucuman deputy Pablo Yedlin (Front Justicialista by Tucumán), and will replace the law 22,909, which is in force since 1983. So far, the mandatory vaccination applies only to children and the new project will be made extensive also to adults. The gratuity of the vaccines, in as much, happened in fact, but from now on it will be protected by law.

According to the text itself, it will be the Executive, through the Ministry of Health of the Nation, which must regulate in a term of 120 days the fine print of the norm for its specific application.

“It’s a law of much consensus, not only was it unanimous in both houses, but it had the support of all the scientific societies, and it puts Argentina at the height of its vaccination schedule, which is very generous,” Yedlin said. dialogue with LA NACION.

Requirement for the DNI

The legislator also explained one of the points of the project that generated more controversy. Until now, proof of vaccination was a requirement to enroll in schools. But Article 9 of the new law states that “the certification of compliance with the National Vaccination Calendar must be required” also at the time of processing the ID, passport or driver’s license.

“It will not interrupt the processing of any document,” said Yedlin and explained that in case of not presenting the full schedule of vaccinations, the person will be “notified” as well as the local health authority, to get in contact and “offer the necessary vaccines”.

“They are control points,” the Tucuman insisted. “It’s not that you will not be able to sign up for the faculty if you do not have the Hepatitis B vaccine, but the university has the right to send you to vaccinate because it’s mandatory that you have it.”

> If you don’t want to donate via the NFU website, you can use PayPal to donate to me directly, using my email address (markcrispinmiller@gmail.com).

> More important: Now that Facebook and the other “social media” have gone Chinese on dissenting views and inconvenient information, it is now crucial that we grow such neo-samiszdat recourses as this list-serve.

So if you should know of others who you think might want to join this list, please don’t hesitate to send us their names/email addresses. Send them to me, at the above address, and Lacy Hannah, at lacy@pm.me.

If you get something out of NFU, please consider making a donation, either as a one-time thing, or monthly (which you can arrange at markcrispinmiller.com).

This is not about my medical expenses (though I am still struggling with them), but, as well, the invaluable assistance that I get from Lacy Hannah, a former student who’s now helping out with the tech end, and other aspects, of my daily efforts here.

I like listening to audio going to/from “the day job” and while running errands. Searching my emails for Mort Sahl, I came upon your email from 2016. Clicking on the Link, YouTube states “Video Unavailable.” Interesting, I don’t recall ever seeing that message before. Tried searching YouTube for the interview elsewhere, no luck.

YouTube censorship, copyright, or someone just pulling a video? Besides the ominous error message, the other item of interest is that there’s no hint whose YouTube Channel it was on. In past cases, when a video’s been pulled for copyright or other reasons, at least it says whose channel it was on. But not this time.

MAKE SURE YOU CIRCULATE THESE MATERIALS! BREAKING THE EMPIRE’S PROPAGANDA MACHINE DEPENDS ON YOU.

“It happened that a fire broke out backstage in a theater. The clown came out to inform the public. They thought it was a jest and applauded. He repeated his warning, they shouted even louder. So I think the world will come to an end amid general applause from all the wits, who believe that it is a joke.” – Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

It was snowing hard in the days before Christmas in 1972 as I sat at my writing desk looking out the back window toward the woods that were filling up with snow. I felt trapped by the heavy snow that made the roads impassable, but even more so by the contemplation of the barbaric “Christmas Bombing” of North Vietnam carried out by Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and their associated war criminals. I was filled with despair and imagined the snow turning red with blood. Earlier that fall, I, together with a thousand others, had been arrested for protesting the dispatching of these B-52 bombers that were indiscriminately massacring Vietnamese. The corporate media, accomplices to war crimes then and now, refused to report on the demonstration and the large number of arrests, despite repeated requests to do so. They were just doing their job.

AN ASSEMBLY OF WAR CRIMINALS—All US presidents have been involved in some act of horrid aggression that could be easily condemned as a Nuremberg War Crime. And they have all lied. But never so criminally and so cynically as the occupants of the White House since Ronald Reagan.

So here we are again as Christmas approaches. The same corporate media obsess about Trump as if something has changed over the decades. Nothing has, except for a growing gulf between reality and fantasy, not a small thing. Between Nixon and Trump lies a vacuity of leadership and a history of evil war-making that the media have disappeared, just as they have disappeared the message of peace that connects Christmas to Good Friday, in favor of corporate capitalism’s favorite season of consumption and memory loss. Thus they have accompanied and promoted the growth of the malignant American empire and its violent expansion across the world. But if one knew the history of those years, one could perhaps find one’s way out of the forest of lies into the clearing of truth, a very big thing indeed. Here’s a bit.

Nixon was first elected in 1968 as a “peace candidate” and proceeded to wage savage attacks on Vietnam and secretly on Laos and Cambodia. He was elected after having treasonously sabotaged a Vietnam peace deal, but the American people in their naivety believed his lies and elected him. After four years of savage war-making and the Watergate break-in, they reelected him in a landslide with the aid of the 18 year old vote, when his opponent, Democratic Senator George McGovern, who campaigned on ending the war and granting amnesty to draft evaders, received 17 electoral votes to Nixon’s 520. So much for war crimes. Then came Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, William Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama – liars and war-mongers all ( I will spare you the details that are easily available) – and now we have Trump, who is no different, just far weirder and therefore a cause of some embarrassment to those who deal the cards.“Earlier that fall, I, together with a thousand others, had been arrested for protesting the dispatching of these B-52 bombers that were indiscriminately massacring Vietnamese. The corporate media, accomplices to war crimes then and now, refused to report on the demonstration and the large number of arrests, despite repeated requests to do so. They were just doing their job…”

“Earlier that fall, I, together with a thousand others, had been arrested for protesting the dispatching of these B-52 bombers that were indiscriminately massacring Vietnamese. The corporate media, accomplices to war crimes then and now, refused to report on the demonstration and the large number of arrests, despite repeated requests to do so. They were just doing their job…”

Nine presidents who claim to be Christians, whose founder was executed by the Roman state for advocating love, not war; presidents who, when they die, we are told by the media, go straight to heaven as their presidential brothers in crime and their acolytes gather round to pray, hold hands, and beam them up in language that would make an idiot laugh. Don’t bother to send in the clowns; they’re here. They gather periodically in the National Cathedral and other Washington, D.C. venues to give us a laugh. But who is laughing at these jokesters who are an embarrassment to the human race?

When JFK was executed by the U.S. national security state for planning to end the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the nuclear arms race, he was succeeded by another “peace” candidate, Lyndon Johnson, number ten on the list of good Christian Presidents, who claimed his opponent in the 1964 election was prepared to nuke the world; so Johnson only proceeded to escalate the war against Vietnam in the most barbarous ways imaginable, killing millions and using young American war-slaves (draftees) to do so.

But enough history. A little bit can make one laugh; delving deep can shock one into an awareness that we have been snowed for a long time and that that sense of despair and entrapment I felt at Christmas 1972 may run deep into the American soul. Perhaps.

Orwell Rolls In His Grave, featuring MCM – Buy the DVD

About News From Underground

News From Underground is a daily e-news service run by Mark Crispin Miller, a Professor of Culture and Communication at NYU. It is based on his belief that academics, like reporters, have a civic obligation to help keep the people well-informed, so that American democracy might finally work.

If you'd like to receive updates delivered to your inbox daily, sign up for News From Underground Alerts:

Help News From Underground!

Message from Mark: "I am a one-man operation, although assisted greatly by some volunteers, and, now and then, by people paid by others for one-time projects. There is no shortage of skilled, dedicated folks out there who want to help me. There is, however, nothing I can pay them with, unless you decide you can contribute something."